Waiting to Vote, Boiling the Agua

Well, I did my civic duty by getting out early today to, as it turned out, wait in a very long line to vote.

I had to leave my iPhone at home because I hadn’t charged the thing overnight, so I was doubly handicapped as I pulled into the grocery store parking lot where the early polling was taking place.

The line was already out the door, and if I’d known how far it snaked through into the building, I might have turned around to come back another day. But, I thought, I’m here, let’s get to it.

So it was pretty slow going, and there was a Starbucks stand directly to my left, but nobody was standing in *that* line. Nobody in a Starbucks line? In the Westlake section of Austin?!!

Something was amiss.

That was when I discovered that Austin was in for a water boil order that had started overnight, this attributed to the flooding we’ve had out west in Llano.

The Reader’s Digest version: The city water has to be kept a specific pressure in order to service fire trucks at fire scenes. However, the silt factor, which is normally at around 3, is up around 400. This is because the city has only been able to process around 100 million gallons of water the last couple of days (which is about how much water we use), instead of the normal 300 million.

So, we’re getting down to the storage units, which need to be replenished, and essentially allow the city to catch up to all that silt.

In the meantime, the time it took me to vote in this election, versus even 2016, was a good 30 minutes longer — in total, about an hour.

For a midterm. American democracy is alive and well.

Though I did joke with my friends waiting in line, that if the Russians were really helping out, they could have cut that hour to at least 30 minutes or less.